TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS AND LIVESTOCK ANIMAL WELFARE: THE CASE OF THE DAIRY COW

Technological devices, which promote animal welfare in livestock farming and contribute to a reduction in environmental impact, have known increasing interest in the European Union (EU). For dairy cows, the contact technologies (sensors) on the body of animals not only facilitate animal welfare, but also support the milk productivity and better quality, thus economic production efficiency. According with available statistical data, showing a boost on productivity, the aim of the present work was to test whether the increase in the realised levels of raw milk could derive from technological factors. To validate this hypothesis a study on the evolutionary development of the reported statistical indicators of the two biologically related variables (cow, raw milk) was presented. The method chosen, made statistically significant, i.e. comparable in the statistical unit of measurement (coefficient of variation) to establish the strength of the linear relationship between the two variables and the corresponding evolution r2, relied on the intensity of the correlation (correlation coefficient r) between two statistical indicators, dairy cattle (independent variable) and raw milk (dependent variable). The results showed that EU quantity of raw cows’s milk realised in EU dairy farms, even in the presence of breaking events, never stopped growing. The representation of the variables’ trends showed, a part of an exception, situations where the respective evolution were not perfectly linear between them. The values of the determination coefficient r2, from 2012-2016 to 2017-2021, in most of the Countries examined decreased. Thus, there were increases in cow’s milk, which conclusively could also be attributed to the adoption of digital devices and specifically to the contact sensors on the cow’s body adopted to ensure animal welfare, to optimize the use of production factors and to detect animal’s physiological activities.